[nilsandrey]

I think I understand your point, but thinking about releasing a hotfix over an old version is a way of maintaining multiple versions... I work once with a team supporting multiple versions of a really complex app(in the sense of a lot of features and DB entities). They support his clients (on-premises) with eventual hotfixes, one service-pack and one version a year.

Some times they were working on changes on a release before a hotfix was addressed, and with cherry-pick's like operations, they took the changes of the hotfixes and applied to the service-pack and new versions with less effort than before they used the model.

With a dev team of 10 programmers, 20 on IT support and hundreds of client's deployments they build a profitable business (subscription-based and in-site support) where the branching model helps a lot.

They spend less time managing the releases, switching context for priority support and dealing with more changes in less time.